Saturday, November 26, 2011

Jason watches HUGO

And it's very, very cute. And the 3-D is well done, although I'll still maintain it's not necessary. It struck me while watching the swooping, kinetic shots that the depth would still be very clear even projected in 2-D. If you can't communicate three dimensional space in two dimensions, then you don't know how to make a movie to begin with, and should just give up.

But, to get away from that tangent, yes, HUGO is a beautiful movie, with heart and whimsy and love and all those things you just wouldn't expect from Scorsese. Ostensibly it's about a kid--Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield)--an orphan who lives in the walls and the clocks of the Paris train station. He steals gears from a local toy shop in order to fix an automaton that his father (Jude Law) was fixing when he passed away. And the grumpy old toy shop owner (Ben Kingsley) turns out to be the temporarily forgotten master filmmaker Georges Méliès, the inventor of special effects and the first to really see the potential of movies as dream-like entertainment. And that's the thing for a cinemaniac like me--I want to see Méliès and all the other films of the time. When Hugo and his friend Isabelle sneak off to the movies and see Harold Lloyd's SAFETY LAST, it's quite a treat. And seeing Méliès' studio recreated was also pretty awesome. I want to see them so much that I stopped caring about Hugo's story and was waiting for the next silent film treat. That's definitely a limitation I bring to the movie, and shouldn't reflect on its inherent quality. Still, that's just the way I reacted, and I can't do anything about it.